Andalusian Treasures - The Washington Revels

34 Pages·2011·15.69 MB·English

Washington Revels
presents
THE CHRISTMAS REVELS
Andalusian
Treasures
Jewish, Arabic and Spanish
Music, Dance and Drama
featuring the music of
Trio Sefardi Layali El Andalus
and
with
Graham Pilato Danny Pushkin
as don juan • as joha
Voces de Oro Shabab al-Andalus Teens
•
Chikitikos Children Mazal Bueno Brass
•
Guitarras Doradas
Roberta Gasbarre
artistic and stage director
Elizabeth Fulford Miller
music director
Amber Ileene Curry
producer
3–4 & 9–11, 2011
DECEMBER
GW University’s Lisner Auditorium
Washington DC
From the Director
S
ometimes I am asked the question “How do you choose the theme of each
year’s Revels?” The answer varies, but this Revels originated in Portland, Oregon, one of
the 10 Revels cities across the country, in 2010. When we encountered their version of
“Andalusian Treasures,” the richness of this special time and place captivated us, and we
charted our course towards the three cultures that lived on the Iberian peninsula from
the 8th through the 15th centuries—Muslim, Jewish (which would become known as
Sephardic), and indigenous Iberian (mostly Christian). Much of the music actually comes
from the 16th century or later because we have too little information about the earlier
music. In this sense, our performance exists outside of time, celebrating the extraordinary
cultural legacy of these peoples and their interaction over 800 years.
Along the way, we discovered Revels touchstones, jewels you will see today that
will make even the most unfamiliar resonate a bit. There is a fool, of course . . . in this
case, Joha, or Goha, or Djoha, or even Nasruddin Hoja. He is an innocent, a trickster.
He teaches by his folly and he belongs to both the Jewish and Arabic diasporas, ranging
far and wide with hundreds of tales that teach through laughter. There is a dragon! The
Terrible Tarasque looks like an ankylosaurus with a scorpion tail and head of a lion. There
is exquisite poetry about the cosmos and our relationship with it, a men’s dance with cane
staves, rounds for peace, and evocative music and dance.
To bring these elements to the stage, we tell the tale of Joha and his friend, the
braggadocio caballero Don Juan, who stumble on a secret room, filled with the riches
of the time of the caliphs. The treasure in the secret storeroom is an extraordinary find
for our young men—but the ultimate treasure is the legacy of this time to the world, the
beauty, wisdom, and passion of three cultures that lived so closely together while still
retaining the heart of what made each unique and extraordinary.
— Roberta Gasbarre, December 2011
About Washington Revels
What is Revels? A nonprofit cultural institution in the District of Columbia area for almost
30 years, Washington Revels creates seasonal celebrations based on traditional music,
dance, and drama from different times and cultures. These celebrations typically involve
adults and children, professionals and nonprofessionals, and many opportunities for
audience participation. The traditional elements provide a sense of the value people have
gotten and can still get from the support of their community and its customs.
In recent years, Revels has become active year-round and now creates other kinds of
events, including informal celebrations, concerts, and performances. We also have a
growing education program for children.
Revels organization. We are one of ten independent non-profit Revels organizations in the
U.S., each with its own board, office and artistic staff, and separate finances. An umbrella
organization, Revels, Inc., in Watertown, Massachusetts maintains artistic standards for all
Revels organizations, researches traditional material, and provides or approves scripts and
music for Christmas Revels productions.
Revels history. The first Christmas Revels took place in December 1957 in New York City
and in January 1958 in Washington, D.C. They were created by John (Jack) Langstaff, then
a music teacher at Potomac School in McLean, Virginia. He founded Revels, Inc. in 1971.
Mary Swope founded Washington Revels, the fourth Revels city, in 1983.
Revels activities. The Christmas Revels is our biggest production, but we have many
other activities throughout the year. We welcome in the spring with May Revels at the
Audubon Naturalist Society’s Nature Fair. We also produce Revels SunFest in downtown
Silver Spring, which features performing groups representing cultures from around the
world. Annual activities also include a Spring Celebration at the National Arboretum,
pub sings, outdoor community sings, and a Harvest Dance. Separate articles describe our
newer activities, which include an after-school program, four performing groups, and
explorations of our local heritage.
What is Revels – really? At one level, Revels is a vehicle for events that are fun and
cultivate a sense of community and shared tradition. At a deeper level, Revels is about the
importance of community celebration to all people. This deeper level is most evident in
our seasonal celebrations, particularly our winter solstice celebrations, which address the
circle of the seasons and the cycle of life. Winter is followed by spring; dark is followed by
light; individuals die, but others are born. Throughout, in times of sorrow and times of joy,
humankind gathers together for support.
Exploring these themes through the prisms of different cultures, Revels’ performances
illustrate specific customs that address universal human hopes and fears while creating
“real-time” celebrations in which cast, crew, and audience members experience our
common humanity. The essential message, and we hope the experience, is that all of us—
adults and children from all walks of life—are part of a community that stretches through
the ages and across national and cultural boundaries.
Andalusia’s Cultural Legacy
This year’s Christmas Revels takes us to the Iberian Peninsula to explore the music, dance,
and drama that is the cultural legacy of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian people who
lived in medieval Andalusia from 711 to 1492, when the Muslims and Jews were expelled
from Spain. What we present on stage is a mix of material from within those years and
what emerged thereafter.
The legacy of these cultures after 1492 to some degree reflects developments in music,
dance, drama, and poetry that happened earlier, when all the groups were living together
in Andalusia. These developments happened within individual cultures and as a result of
the interaction among the cultures. (There is a separate article on music elsewhere in this
program.)
When the Muslims conquered most of what is now Spain and founded Andalusia, they
introduced architectural, scientific, agricultural, and intellectual ideas then unknown in
the West. They also brought a policy of tolerance for Jews and Christians as “People of
the Book,” monotheists who trace their religion to Abraham. This policy led to a wave of
Jewish immigration and left Christians relatively free to pursue their own activities.
The 800 years during which these three cultures inhabited Andalusia were not a
uniformly “golden age” of tolerance, but particularly in the first 300 years of Muslim
rule there was enough tolerance to permit considerable positive interaction. Literature in
Hebrew and Arabic flourished, Jews worked at the highest level in Muslim governments,
and Arabic music influenced Christian musicians. The degree of religious liberty in
Andalusia inspired one Jewish diplomat to try to persuade Byzantium to follow suit.
Even for most of the next 200 years, the three cultures continued to coexist well in some
parts of Andalusia. A 13th-century Castilian king even gathered scholars and musicians
from all faiths to try to create a Spanish culture.
Arabic and Sephardic poetry also flourished in Andalusia, and two of the leading
intellectuals of the time, Maimonides (a Jew) and Averroes (a Muslim), appear on our stage
to recite examples. One poetic form of the time illustrates cultural interaction. Andalusian
Jews and Muslims, writing in Hebrew and Arabic, composed very similar poems that
always ended with a few lines written in a primitive form of Spanish. They wrote even
those lines with Hebrew or Arabic letters.
In sum, interaction among these cultures contributed to the legacy that each was able to
build on while in Andalusia and take with them after their 800 years in Spain. In a very
real way, then, our celebration of Andalusia’s cultural legacy is also a celebration of the
level of tolerance that permitted such “cross-pollination” to take place. Although the actual
level of tolerance varied significantly by time and place, we are grateful for the symbol of
tolerance that medieval Andalusia has become.

—Terry Winslow
Andalusian Music Traditions and Legacy
This year’s Christmas Revels explores the rich fabric of music born from the confluence of
cultures—Moorish, Sephardic, and indigenous Iberian—that existed between the 8th and
15th centuries in what we now call Spain. These three cultures influenced each others’
music and, when the period of coexistence ended, each group took its own distinct musical
tradition into the 16th century and beyond.
In 9th-century Córdoba, then the capital of Andalusia, Persian and Arab musicians
began developing a musical style that synthesized Spanish and Afro-Arab traditions. This
Arab-Andalusian style has had a lasting impact on music in Spain, North Africa, and the
Mediterranean. For example, the majority of the songs in the 13th-century collection
Cantigas de Santa María employ an Arabic poetic style called zajal. The pronounced
rhythmic patterns of Judeo-Spanish music are thought to reflect the influence of Arabic
music. Arab-Andalusian music was very influential in North Africa even before 1492,
when the Muslims left Spain, and the influence continues today.
Arab-Andalusian music is primarily melodic—both the voice and instruments perform in
unison with no harmony parts. In performance, the melodies can be highly ornamented,
making them sound quite exotic to the Western ear. Rhythms are also complex, performed
on distinctive percussion and stringed instruments.
Within Andalusia, the music of the Jews helped preserve and shape medieval Spanish
romances (ballads). After 1492, the Sephardim—the Spanish Jews—carried their musical
traditions from Spain into Northern Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, where they joined
existing Jewish communities. Wherever they went, the Sephardim took along a sense of
their common heritage and their distinctive secular music. Because Sephardic musicians
have interacted with musicians from their local areas, there are now distinctive Sephardic
musical styles in the eastern and western Mediterranean.
Sephardic music relates primarily to the home and is an oral tradition typically created,
sung, and passed down by women. In our show we sing two Hanukkah songs written by
Flory Jagoda, a revered Sephardic singer and resident of the Washington area, based on
her memories of spending Hanukkah with her grandmother while growing up in Bosnia.
Many Sephardic Jews speak Ladino or Judeo-Spanish, the language of our Sephardic songs.
Over the centuries, Sephardic Jews have created Ladino by adding both Hebrew words and
words from the languages of the places where they lived.
As the medieval period came to a close, a tremendous outpouring of polyphonic vocal
music, both sacred and secular, flourished under royal patronage. It was the beginning of
the Spanish Renaissance. Some of the earliest purely instrumental music was written for
vihuela (a Spanish cousin of the lute). And many important collections of Spanish poetry
and songs were created, including the Cancionero Musical de Palacio and the Cancionero
de Upsala. Most of the songs in these collections were romances or villancicos, folk carols
with a set pattern of repetitions.
The Characters in Andalusian Treasures
As we explore the nature of Andalusia’s treasures, we meet five human characters—two
very foolish and three very wise. We also encounter an unusual beast.
Joha. This year’s Christmas Revels features a fool who is known by many names. For
example, he is Joha in Sephardic folktales, Goha in Egypt, and Nasreddin in Turkey.
He is quite different from the European “wise fool” who has appeared in other Revels
productions. That fool is a simpleton but is sometimes able to see truth clearly and
offer serious insights. (As Revels veterans know, he can also raise St. George from the
dead.) Joha, on the other hand, is a natural fool who is incapable of insight and has
little understanding of the world around him. The consequences of his foolish conduct,
however, often provide lessons on how to behave.
Don Juan. Our Don Juan is a composite of two fictional characters. One
is a figure from Spanish folk tales who was portrayed as Don Juan “The
Seducer” in a 1630 novel. The other is Il Capitano, a swashbuckling stock
character in Italian commedia dell’arte.
Averroes. The 12th-century Islamic intellectual Averroes is most
famous for translating and writing commentaries on Aristotle’s works,
which for centuries had been mostly forgotten in the West. Even
though he advocated the unpopular view that there is no incompatibility
between philosophy (reason) and religion, he worked for and was
protected by tolerant Muslim leaders for most of his life. Eventually,
however, his opponents burned many of his books and arranged for his banishment.
Maimonides. Like Averroes, Maimonides was born in 12th-century Córdoba, wrote in
Arabic, became a “philosopher/theologian,” attempted to reconcile the truths of reason
and religion, and had books burned by co-religionists. Maimonides, however, was
Jewish. When he was quite young, Andalusia was conquered by fundamentalist Muslims,
and Maimonides’ family went to North Africa. He eventually settled in Egypt, where he
continued to write and work as a physician to the court of the great sultan Saladin.
Egeria. During the period 381-384, a Christian woman named Egeria or Aetheria made
an often-solitary pilgrimage to Jerusalem and other sites in the Holy Land. Some believe
that she was born in Spain. This Christian explorer of historic sites in what we now call
the Middle East is a fitting guide for our exploration of Andalusia’s Christian, Jewish, and
Muslim cultures.
The Tarasque. With the shell of a turtle, the tail of a scorpion, six legs, and the head of a
lion, the Tarasque is a strange and dangerous beast. The Golden Legend, a 12th-century
biography of the saints, tells us that in 48 C.E., after terrifying the people of a small French
town, the Tarasque was tamed by St. Marta (the sister of Mary Magdalene). She then led it
back to town, where the residents killed it. These days, the Tarasque participates in some
French and Spanish celebrations of the Feast of Corpus Christi.
—Terry Winslow
INTRODUCTION

The action in this Christmas Revels begins in a treasure room in 10th-century Andalusia,
part of what we now call Spain. Two adventurers from the 16th century somehow stumble
into the room while running away from a dinner bill they cannot pay. It’s no ordinary
treasure room, though. Some treasures move and
others sing, while one treasure is worth more than all
of the others combined! Their treasure hunt takes us
on a magical ride across time and space to encounter
music, dance, poetry, and drama from the early
medieval period to the 20th century.
Andalusia was home to Jewish, Muslim, and Christian
peoples from the 8th through the 15th centuries,
and our time travel permits us to explore their
cultural legacies during and after that time. As you
watch during our travels, think about what might
be the treasure of treasures. The gold? The jewelry?
A valuable antique? The answer lies in the magic of
medieval Córdoba.
PART I
1. Brass Prelude
Antonio de Cabezón (1510-1566) was one of the most important Spanish composers of
his time and among the first to compose pieces specifically for the organ. Blind from early
childhood, he was hired by the royal family at age 16 and stayed with them for the rest
of his life. He travelled widely and was therefore able to influence, and be influenced by,
many of the other composers of his day. Cabezón’s composition “Diferencias sobre el canto
del Caballero” from the Obras de música is arranged by Robert Posten.
MAZAL BUENO BRASS
2. Tan buen ganadico (So much fine cattle)
Our procession leads us down into a room laden with ancient treasure, hidden deep
under the city of Córdoba. This villancico, a popular Spanish musical and poetic
form made up of several stanzas and a repeating refrain, tells what a pleasure it
is to look at cattle in a lush green valley—a restful scene that contrasts with the
tune’s complex and driving rhythm. The words and music are by Juan del Encina
(1468-1530), the leading contributor to the Cancionero Musical de Palacio,
a 16th-century manuscript that is one of the richest sources of Renaissance
polyphony.
Elizabeth Fulford Miller, Susan Gaeta, and Alden Michels, singers
Tina Chancey and Jamie Sandel, violins
VOCES DE ORO TRIO SEFARDI GUITARRAS DORADAS
PALMAS
3. A vint-i-cinc de desembre (On the 25th of December)
This 16th-century Catalan Christmas carol is usually called “Fum, Fum, Fum” in English.
The “fum” sound may imitate the sound of a drum or perhaps a guitar.
Greg Lewis, song leader
VOCES DE ORO MAZAL BUENO BRASS
ALL SING:
4. Taqsim (Improvisation)
A taqsim, one of the principal instrumental genres of Arabic music, is ordinarily
improvised and consists of several sections. It is performed as an introductory
piece to set a meditative mood before the next song. Rachid Halihal plays
the oud, a pear-shaped stringed instrument prominent in medieval and
modern Islamic music that was the parent of the European lute. The oud
is one of the oldest continuously used string instruments, with roots in
ancient Persia and Pharaonic Egypt.

Rachid Halihal, oud
5. Lamma bada yatathanna (She walked with a swaying gait)
“Who can answer my lament for love and distress but the graceful one, the queen of
beauty?” This traditional Arabic love song is based on a poetic form (muwashshah) that
emerged in 9th-century Andalusia, spread to North Africa and the Middle East, and was
also used by some Sephardic poets.
Rachid Halihal and Elisabeth Myers, singers
LAYALI EL ANDALUS VOCES DE ORO
6. Three Sages
Our three sages are Averroes and Maimonides,
respectively the preeminent 11th-century
Muslim and Jewish intellectuals associated
with Andalusia, and Egeria (or Aetheria), a
4th-century woman who made a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem and the surrounding area and whose
letters to friends have given scholars a look into
early Christian liturgical practices. The sages
make periodic appearances in this production, often, as here, to share an intellectual or
philosophical point, using the lush poetry of the era. This recitation is from “Granada,”
by Solomon Ben Gabirol, an 11th-century Jewish poet and philosopher who fled Córdoba
when it was conquered by intolerant Muslims but was then protected by an accepting
Muslim leader.
Kathrin V. Halpern, Egeria Alan Haeberle, Averroes Jim Eustice, Maimonedes
7. Quando el Rey Nimrod (When the King Nimrod)
This song is one of the many pieces in this production from the Sephardic diaspora—
people descended from the Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492. Said to date from
the 16th or 17th century, it tells the story of the birth of Abraham, the “light of Israel,”
luz de Israel. The tyrannical King Nimrod, a great-grandson of Noah, foresaw the birth
of Abraham. To protect idolatry from monotheism, he ordered the death of all new-born
sons in his kingdom. Abraham, of course, miraculously survived and became known as the
Father of Three Faiths (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism).
Susan Gaeta, singer TRIO SEFARDI VOCES DE ORO
8. Joha the Fool
As usual, our program includes a fool, this time one who is loved in the Sephardic diaspora
and in many Arabic-speaking countries. He also has many other names.
Danny Pushkin, Joha
9. Songs and Games for Children
“Gatatumba” is a children’s song whose lyrics refer to musical instruments. “Matesha,
Matesha” is a traditional Sephardic song/poem that is sung-spoken by girls who are
swinging on a swing, a common venue of courtship in Morocco. “Tafta Hindi” (Indian
taffeta) is an Arabic children’s song about sharing treasure.
Tina Chancey, Aiden Mattke, and Darrow Alec Theisen Sherman, violins
CHIKITIKOS CHILDREN
10. Pues que tanto bien tenemos (Because we do it so well)
The lyrics of this popular baylado (dance song), written for the Feast of Corpus Christi,
consist of repeated proclamations that “because we do it so well, we will sing, we will
dance, and we will recite.”
Guenevere Spilsbury, Will Wurzel, and Marissa Maley, singers
Tina Chancey, viola da gamba VOCES DE ORO GUITARRAS DORADAS
11. Don Juan
Our Don Juan is not a fool, but his pretentious and swashbuckling ways are in fact quite
foolish. For more details, see the article “The Characters in Andalusian Treasure.”
Graham Pilato, Don Juan MAZAL BUENO BRASS
12. A Prayer for the New Year
The text of this haunting song is a venerable Sephardic prayer, Yehi Ratzones, which
combines Hebrew and Ladino, a language spoken by Sephardic Jews that is closely related
to Spanish. The music is by Flory Jagoda, a Washington-area musician whose ancestors
left Spain in 1492. In 2002, the National Endowment for the Arts recognized her work to
preserve and promote Sephardic music by making her a National Heritage Fellow.
Susan Gaeta, singer David Buchbut, frame drum VOCES DE ORO